On Thu, Jul 18, 2002 at 08:04:03PM +0200, Martin Schulze wrote: > Steve Langasek wrote: > > > 4. What would be the proper way to solve this problem if a) or b) are > > > not in complience with the license terms? > > Are you asking what A and B should do if they wish to bring themselves > > into compliance, or are you asking what can be done to legally force > > them to? > I'm asking what A and B should do to bring themselves into > compliance. I don't want to sue or attack entities. I would like to > document the required behaviour somewhere, though, so entities know > what their obligation is if they are repackaging and redistributing > the Debian system. Once A or B has distributed GPLed binaries in this manner without the source, the offense is there, and they are vulnerable to a lawsuit because of the license violation. C.f. the widely-publicized MySQL court case. Assuming all parties are acting in good faith, which has tended to be the case in the Free Software community, it is probably sufficient if A and B take steps to ensure that all further distribution of binaries complies with the GPL. If A or B knows how to reach some or all of those they distributed binaries to commercially, as an additional show of good faith they might send a copy of the sources to these recipients as the GPL originally required them to do. The best remedy, however, is still to avoid violating the GPL in the first place; while I believe that most authors of Free Software are willing to forgive innocent mistakes, neither Debian nor anyone else can protect A and B from a lawsuit if this turns out to not be the case. Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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